Paper Title
"Who's The Boss?": Examining the Effects of Power Inequality in Health Care
Location
Room 222, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
Keywords
health, medicine, women, women's health, health care, power, history, anthropology
Start Date
April 2016
End Date
April 2016
Abstract
This paper examines the effects of educational, economic, sexuality, gender, and racial privilege present within Western health care. The medical history of the United States presents an avenue where intersectionality is unavoidable as the power structure within the Southeastern, post-slavery United States shows anthropological and historical support for the ways in which establishing a White Male status quo buried the reality of healers and midwives that allowed for survival of slaves and owners. A dissection of the early school of medicine and influences, such as Francis Bacon and the Tuskegee experiments, which encourage violence and silence, moves to show replacing women as healers has had a lasting effect on a lack of care in women’s health, with explicit considerations of access to care for transgender women. History has structured a health system that has forsaken the patient and provided a solid foundation for health as consumable commodity, rather than basic human right. Furthermore, this paper should serves as a call to educational institutions to provide an accurate history of the shift in the patient/care provider hierarchy in order to develop a working praxis within these educational programs in an effort to eradicate health disparities.
"Who's The Boss?": Examining the Effects of Power Inequality in Health Care
Room 222, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
This paper examines the effects of educational, economic, sexuality, gender, and racial privilege present within Western health care. The medical history of the United States presents an avenue where intersectionality is unavoidable as the power structure within the Southeastern, post-slavery United States shows anthropological and historical support for the ways in which establishing a White Male status quo buried the reality of healers and midwives that allowed for survival of slaves and owners. A dissection of the early school of medicine and influences, such as Francis Bacon and the Tuskegee experiments, which encourage violence and silence, moves to show replacing women as healers has had a lasting effect on a lack of care in women’s health, with explicit considerations of access to care for transgender women. History has structured a health system that has forsaken the patient and provided a solid foundation for health as consumable commodity, rather than basic human right. Furthermore, this paper should serves as a call to educational institutions to provide an accurate history of the shift in the patient/care provider hierarchy in order to develop a working praxis within these educational programs in an effort to eradicate health disparities.
